batman

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – The Killing Joke (2016)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

When we were recently discussing Brandon’s viewing of Theodore Rex on the podcast, he talked about how it was comforting to know that there are movies that have been universally derided as bad which are, in fact, bad. Batman: The Killing Joke has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score out of any of these movies; although there are nine films that didn’t get enough reviews to provide a score, that list of non-scored films includes some of the best, like All Star Superman and Crisis on Two Earths. Rotten Tomatoes is, as we always say, an imperfect criterion, but because it got a one-day theatrical release in order to generate buzz, it also has the highest number of reviews on that site with forty-one critics weighing in (the next highest, Batman: The Long Halloween, Part One, has nineteen reviews), so in this case, it bears out in the critical response. It’s true: this one is bad bad. I always assumed that it generated a negative response because it’s an adaptation of a truly top-tier Batman (and Joker) story, and that people simply didn’t like some of the changes that were made to it or were otherwise disappointed. I had also heard rumblings about the “character assassination” of Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, which at the time seemed like typical Comic Book Guy grumblings, but no, that part is true as well. If anything, all the backlash against it that I remember seeing at the time was insufficient to express just what a fucking disaster this is. 

The film starts with voiceover from Batgirl (Tara Strong), as she opens with a fourth-wall wink about how we the viewers probably didn’t expect this story to begin this way. The first half, which is all new material, is mostly about her. She watches from afar as her father, the venerable Commissioner Gordon (Ray Wise), meets with her Batmentor (Kevin Conroy, our beloved); she becomes the obsessive fixation of the unlikely named Paris Franz (Maury Sterling), an upstart crime family scion who aims to decapitate and replace the organization’s leadership; she even gets a catty gay best friend with whom she works at the library and who provides a sounding board for her thinly disguised musings about her crush on Batman. Yep, that’s right. Barbara has the hots for Bruce in this one, and that relationship culminates. See, he gets on her about taking too many risks in her pursuit of Franz, and the narrative goes out of its way to make him correct, as she consistently gets in over her head and has to be rescued by Batman. Every scene in which she strikes out on her own, he has to bail her out, so yeah, you could say that one of the most beloved and competent characters in the canon does undergo character assassination, for sure. This eventually leads up to the two of them having an argument before she pins the older man down, and they have sex. 

I’ve seen this scene described as being “played for fanservice” in certain parts of the internet, and I don’t think that’s the case at all. What happens on screen takes barely a few seconds; Barbara is on top of Bats, she straddles him fully clothed and takes off the top half of her costume to reveal her bra, and the camera does a (to me) comical pan up to a gargoyle statue on the rooftop with them that appears to be enjoying the show. I’ve also seen a lot of criticism about that tired canard about age gap issues, and I also personally do not see a problem with that here. Bruce could have done more to discourage her, but as she is the initiator and the most enthusiastic participant, even with absolutely no previous encouragement from Bruce, my judgment is that she’s completely in control and has full agency in the situation. She’s got a thing for an emotionally unavailable older man, she gets her rocks off, and afterward, she talks to her one-dimensional gay BFF about how good it was. The problem here is that, shortly after this, she shakes off the cowl and hood for good when she nearly beats Franz to death and retires, then disappears from the narrative until it’s time for her to play her role in the part of the movie that’s actually an adaptation of The Killing Joke from 1988.

In the second half of the film, Batman comes to the realization that one day, he and the Joker will reach a point where the only choice will be to kill the villain or be killed by him. In an effort to try and prevent this, he goes to see Joker in Arkham, only to realize that the man himself has escaped yet again and left a decoy in his place. Elsewhere, Joker obtains an amusement park and a new band of sideshow folks—conjoined ladies, wolf boy, bearded lady, etc.—to act as his goons du jour. Interspersed in his new plans are flashbacks to before he became the Clown Prince of Crime. He was a comedian who couldn’t support his family, so he took a job with a local crime syndicate that was supposed to be for only one night; on the day of the heist, he learns his wife and unborn child were killed, but he’s strong-armed into moving forward with the crime anyway; when the robbery he’s involved in goes south, Batman arrives and he is frightened into falling over the edge into a vat of chemicals, which turns him into the Joker we know. Once everything is all arranged, he kidnaps Jim Gordon from his home and, in the process, shoots Barbara in her torso, the bullet ripping through her body and rendering her paraplegic. He also does something … untoward with her. Trigger warning for assault; skip to the next paragraph if that’s not something you can handle. You see, in the comic, I never got the impression that Joker raped Barbara. He definitely sexually assaulted her, as he stripped her and took pictures of her nude, gunshot body so that he could further torture Gordon with these images (the image of him holding his camera is the most iconic frame from the comic), but this film takes it further. When Batman is informed of the state that Barbara was in when she was found, much is left unsaid, and it’s implied that the Joker took advantage of her, beyond photography. The manhunt for Joker leads to a group of sex workers who tell the investigator with whom they are talking that the villain normally comes straight to them first as soon as he escapes, but that they haven’t heard from him and assume that this means he was able to get his kicks elsewhere. And that’s part of what makes this movie not just bad, but gross. We get two additions to the narrative here about Barbara’s sexuality: one a desired, consensual encounter with Batman, and the other a non-consensual assault by the Joker, with the former being added to the narrative to raise the stakes of the latter, not for Barbara’s sake, but for Bruce’s. See, now it’s even worse because Joker took that from him, too. 

The rest of the story plays out along the canonical narrative beats of the comic on which the film is based. Batman goes to the amusement park lair, he and Joker have a little cat and mouse game where they talk about their relationship and how it appears that it can only end one way, and Batman tries to get through to his insane archnemesis that things could be different and offers him another path. Jim Gordon survives Joker’s attempts to turn him into another Joker by breaking him psychologically. At the end, Joker is subdued, and he tells Batman a joke about two escaping asylum inmates that demonstrates the futility of one insane person trying to help the other, which forces even the dour Bats to laugh. Barbara awakens in the hospital and is on the road to recovery (if you’re curious, no, her friend never comes to see her and we never hear about him again after his last scene, because he’s just that superfluous), and we see her prepare to get to work fighting crime in a new way. Fin. 

I hated this. The animation is lazy in ways that I didn’t think I’d see in one of these productions (there seem to be about a dozen different book spines that were drawn for the movie, and they are repeated endlessly in both Barbara’s home and in the library scenes, sometimes in huge groups). The narrative choices are abysmal and so grossly misogynistic that the decades-old source material, which was criticized as sexist in its day, feels more modern. In this line of work and especially as the torch-bearers of low-art-as-real-art that we of Swampflix have been slotted into by the appetite for trash that drew us together in the first place, we end up revisiting a lot of things that mainstream (and armchair) critics have designated as “bad movies.” It’s simply in our nature to find the fun and joy in these, to see what glisters in the crap, and our evaluation is positive. However, as with Brandon and Theodore Rex, sometimes a film comes along that reminds you that, yeah, movies can be bad, actually, and that not everything to which that appellation is applied is a secret gem waiting to be unearthed. Sometimes, garbage is just garbage. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Bad Blood (2016)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

We’ve talked a little bit about the CW’s “Arrowverse” series of shows in this feature, but there’s one name that hasn’t really come up here yet, and that’s Batwoman (no, not that one). The interconnectedness of the so-called “Bat Family” is already a tangled web, and it gets more tangled every year, so I’m not going to get into that, but suffice it to say that the current Batwoman, aka Kate Kane, was introduced in 2006 as an updated version of an earlier character, one who was introduced for the sole purpose of showing how super not-gay Batman was in the wake of Frederic Wertham’s infamous censorship call-to-arms, The Seduction of the Innocent. As a way of thumbing the industry’s collective nose at Wertham and his regressive quackery, Kate was explicitly made a lesbian. This was a big deal at the time (as someone who was reading Young Avengers, which featured a gay couple in the form of Wiccan and Hulkling, I can tell you that the contemporary comic letter pages were a fiery, brimstone-y place), and in some ways still was at the time that Batwoman, the 2019 TV series, premiered – at least, if the neanderthal braying of online agitators in the wake of the show’s airing is anything to go by. In the series, which follows the characterization of Kate/Batwoman that was introduced by our old friend The New 52, Bruce Wayne’s cousin Kate returns to Gotham some time after the abdication of the city by its Dark Knight, and she discovers the Batcave and all the gadgets, retrofits them to suit her needs, and then sets out to clean up the city. Tale as old as time, right? 

Among the DC CW shows, Batwoman was the most … cursed, one could say. The first season never completed filming because of COVID, the lead performer (Ruby Rose) left between seasons one and two, and the show’s mixed messaging about the role of the “Crows,” a private security firm headed by Kate’s father, was questionable even before BLM and has only grown more tone deaf over time. Reports have been mixed for years as to whether Rose was fired (for alleged behavior on set) or quit (due to being pretty badly injured during some stunt filming and not taking adequate recuperation time), and although we’ll probably never know for certain, I can say that I think Rose leaving was to the show’s benefit. That tone deafness regarding “non-police” police was rampant all over the first season, to the point where, although I would never agree with the bigots who hated the show on principle about why, they weren’t wrong that it … kinda sucked. 

Rose’s exit allowed for the show to go in a different direction. Javicia Leslie was cast as Ryan Wilder, an ex-con out on parole following a short term she served following some poor police work (redundant, I know) on the part of the Crows; when Kate’s plane crashes near where Ryan has parked for the night in the van that she’s living in, Ryan finds the batsuit and puts it to work right away. She was a completely fresh take on the character, and that allowed for new and interesting developments. In the first season, the romantic conflict comes from the fact that Kate and her love interest, Meagan Good’s Sophie Moore, were in military training together before Kate was given the boot for failing to follow “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” while Sophie didn’t speak up for Kate or herself and is still deeply closeted by the time of the pilot. Batwoman’s archnemesis, Alice (as in “of Wonderland”), is also tied to Kate because—spoiler alert—she’s actually the long presumed dead twin sister that Kate hasn’t seen since her supposed death when they were in elementary school. It didn’t help that Rachel Skarsten’s not-quite-Joker performance was the most interesting thing about the series, either, making her more engaging and magnetic than our purported hero. 

So, as season two begins, you have a whole supporting cast who not only don’t know if Kate’s dead or alive, but who also have no idea who this new person in Kate’s costume is. Skarsten’s Alice has to find something new to obsess over now that she can’t just keep pestering the sister she blames for never finding her, and her attempts to play on the guilt of that become a no-sell for Ryan, who grew up in the foster system. To their credit, the CW DC shows often tried to address social issues, and even when their heart was in the right place, it did so pretty clumsily (Black Lightning did it best, obviously, while Supergirl was a real roller-coaster of comrade/allyship). When it was made a selling point of the show, it was often to the show’s detriment. For me, this comes through most clearly in Batwoman’s first season treatment of Sophie, where filthy rich white woman Kate Kane lives in constant judgment of Sophie’s past choices. Kate’s constant exhortations that Sophie should come out of the closet are pure Western neoliberalism, dictating the lives of others without real knowledge of their lived experiences and dangers. But, because it had to pull a soft reboot before it ever really got going, Batwoman was able to do more and be a more interesting text for discourse because it wasn’t a “message” show, or it was at least no longer trying to send the same message that it was from its initial conception. Over time, Ryan and Sophie grow closer without all the emotional baggage of what Kate and Sophie had in the past, and this is the only show that I can think of offhand which had a queer relationship between two Black women as its primary romance storyline. It ended up being a lot better than it had a right to be. 

This is all yet another long lead up to me talking about an animated DC film, because this one introduces the Kate Kane Batwoman to this continuity. Batman: Bad Blood opens some six months after Batman vs. Robin, in a pretty cool sequence in which several C-tier Bat-nemeses are gathered in a warehouse and a familiar cloaked figure starts to take them out from the shadows—except, as the firing of a handgun from the darkness reveals—this isn’t Batman (Jason O’Mara), but Batwoman (Yvonne Strahovski). Batman soon intervenes himself, but in so doing, he ends up being blown to bits when the warehouse explodes. The absence of Batman, highlighted by the fact that the Bat-signal is going unanswered and the public has started to notice, leads to Bruce’s son Damian (Stuart Allen) being drawn home, and prompts the return of Nightwing/Dick Grayson (Sean Maher) as well, while Kate enlists her father’s help in trying to find any evidence that Bruce is still alive. Dick finds himself forced to take on the mantle of Batman—something that was his greatest dream as a child before it morphed into the thing that he wanted to escape from most as he matured—but when he recognizes Kate, he unmasks himself to her and takes her on as a probationary member of the team. They’re further joined by yet another new Bat-hero, Batwing (Gaius Charles), who is the son of Wayne Enterprises’ Lucius Fox. 

The villain this time around is someone called “The Heretic,” whom Batman seemed to recognize despite his mask in the moments before his death. We in the audience even get a glimpse of the man beneath when he does, but this franchise’s aforementioned difficulty in differentiating the faces of its square-jawed manly men ensures that it means nothing to us. It turns out that he’s operating under the direction of Damian’s mother and Bruce’s ex-lover, Talia al-Ghul (Morena Baccarin), who also has the Mad Hatter and his mind control tech as integral parts of her plan. The Bat Brigade invades her hideout and manages a rescue of Bruce before the fifty-minute mark, and then the real evil plot kicks in: Talia’s turned him into a Batmanchurian Candidate, with the intention of using Hatter’s tech to take over Gotham City (and then, of course, the world). From there, the film dissolves into a series of (admittedly well-executed) cliches, with the finale taking place aboard a floating tech summit. We get our designated girl fight between Talia and Batwoman, Batman’s brainwashing is broken by one of those “I know you’re in there somewhere” speeches, and a floating base is prevented from colliding with Wayne Tower at juuuuuuuust the last second. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s fun, and sufficiently exciting. I got a real kick out of watching all of these folks flying around in their costumes; it gave me flashbacks to watching G-Force/Gatchaman in my youth. 

It’s telling that I had more to say about the Batwoman TV series than I did about this movie. Funnily enough, this one goes back to basics with its Kate Kane, as she is decidedly not Bruce’s cousin here. The most interesting thing about this one is that it gives us a chance to see how these characters play off of each other when the title character is missing, where we have a void in the center of this narrative that creates an opportunity for us to spend more time with the others. Dick and Damian are the most fun together that they have ever been here, and the backstory that Dick and Kate knew each other because of cotillions and such is a nice detail. That still highlights some of the film’s weaknesses. These have become self-perpetuating now, so there’s no need to think too hard about certain details; for example, it would have been much more fun if Dick-as-Batman had gotten a little too acrobatic with his fighting, and if this had been the thing to tip off Damian and Kate that he wasn’t the “real” Batman. Instead, they just know when they see him. The dialogue here is a bit more fun than normal too, since Batman isn’t around glooming up the place, and that’s a nice change, but it doesn’t reach the level of being truly special.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Gods and Monsters (2015)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

It would be very easy for this film’s setting, in which we see a “different” or “morally inverted/skewed” twist on the Justice League, to be very tired at this point. We’ve had good heroes framed as evil, seen a true hero face off against a team of morally questionable “heroes” who act as his foil(s), and visited both an alternate dimension with evil versions of our heroes and an alternate timeline with morally “unchained” versions of our heroes. I’ve seen part of the big Crisis on Infinite Earths animated film that DC is currently in the process of releasing at this very moment, and spoiler alert, we’re not out of the woods yet. Surprisingly, by going full “Elseworlds” with this one, it feels fresh and inventive, rather than like we’re trodding all-too-familiar ground. 

In the world of Justice League: Gods and Monsters, the titular team is composed of only three people: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Except that this Wonder Woman isn’t Diana, Princess of Themyscira or Paradise Island, but a humanoid extraterrestrial warrior woman named Bekka who hails from the planet of New Genesis. Batman isn’t Bruce Wayne, but is instead Dr. Kirk Langstrom, who appears in the comics and its adaptations as B-tier (if you’re feeling generous) Batman villain Man-Bat, a giant bat creature who was once a man. Here, Langstrom is reimagined as a kind of vampiric anti-hero in the vein of Morbius. Superman is still the last son of Krypton, but we eschew the traditional baby-in-the-space-bulrushes story, and instead Jor-El and Lara are just going to dump some DNA into a rocket and send off a theoretical child they neither know nor love, like in Man of Steel. At the last moment, however, General Zod storms into the laboratory and sticks his finger into the machine (not a euphemism), so that the child that arrives after space gestation is genetically his and Lara’s son. Upon reaching the earth, instead of being discovered by the Kents, who are able to adopt the space child and hide his spaceship on their farm, he is instead first discovered by migrant workers who must flee from government agents, causing this Superman to grow up with no knowledge of his heritage while the government has possession of his pod and access to its technology. 

It’s an interesting set-up that allows us to actually examine who these characters are, how they maintain relationships with each other and people on the outside, and how we perceive them as icons through a new lens, darkly. Superman (Benjamin Bratt) here has a more complicated relationship with humanity at large, and at one point idly comments that it might be easier to enforce peace through conquest. Is this a matter of nature or nurture? If it’s the latter, is it possible that there is some genetic predisposition toward egomania that he inherited from his militaristic father? If it’s nurture, is this the result of his identity being deliberately kept from him, or perhaps the result of more direct interaction with the ineptitude (and danger) of the status quo, having seen the way that the American government and people treated his undocumented adopted parents? His relationship with Lois Lane (Paget Brewster) is more adversarial here, and that’s a lot of fun to watch. Like mainstream Wonder Woman, Bekka (Tamara Taylor) is royalty, but instead of coming to “man’s world” as an ambassador of peace, she’s a refugee with nowhere to go after entering into an arranged marriage that was secretly an assassination/coup plot by her father. She’s carrying around a greater burden than Wonder Woman normally does, but she’s nonetheless still paired with Steve Trevor (Tahmoh Penikett) who is now the liaison between President Amanda Waller (Penny Johnson Jerald!) and the League. 

As with most things in DC animation, however, Batman is still the star of the show. Michael C. Hall brings a lot of gravitas and pathos to Kirk Langstrom, which is good news, since he’s in a “these super scientists all knew each other in college and there was a terrible accident” plot. The film has to have a pretty strong emotional center if you’re aiming for a demographic that, if they’re at all interested in your product, has probably already seen this exact thing lampooned on The Venture Brothers; I’ve never seen Dexter, so my primary Hall touchpoint is Six Feet Under, and there’s a lot of the vulnerability and introversion that Hall brought to David Fisher there that’s coming through in this performance, perhaps making it slightly better than it has a right to be. See, he was one of the hand-picked graduates of a select group of students overseen by this world’s benevolent(ish) Lex Luthor (Jason Isaacs), although he’s only really remained close to his former best bud and nanomachine specialist Will Magnus (C. Thomas Howell) and Will’s wife Tina (Grey Griffin). Flashbacks to their college days reveal that Tina was always more in love with Kirk than Will, but that the former’s aloofness meant that she found herself in the arms of the latter, although Kirk’s social awkwardness partially stems from his desperate need to find a cure for a wasting disease with which he is afflicted. He’s researching the use of bat plasma, naturally, and when he hits upon the idea of incorporating Will’s research into his own as a hybrid treatment, they put their heads together on it, resulting in the unfortunate Hero Dracula state in which Kirk now finds himself. 

The backstory of all three characters takes up a good portion of this film’s runtime, but it never feels expositional. This also means that the main plot of the film is cut down to the bare essentials, which does wonders for the pacing. It’s essentially a mystery story, as we see several other members of the Luthor special program for geniuses killed off by dark, unrecognizable creatures. When the third of these murders occur, it becomes clear that someone is attempting to frame the Justice League for these killings by mimicking their powers and/or fighting techniques. What is “Project Fairplay,” and what does it have to do with the murders? And why take the extra step of making it seem like the Justice League has crossed the moral event horizon? It’s an effective little mystery, probably the first time that one of these movies has attempted a superwhodunit and managed to succeed, with multiple twists that lead up to the big reveal. 

It’s also worth noting that Gods and Monsters is done in the artistic style of Bruce Timm, which is to say that it echoes the design aesthetics of Batman: The Animated Series and its associated properties, including Justice League and Justice League: Unlimited. What’s interesting about that is that one of the occasional complaints about those series was that the character designs were too static, specifically that it could be hard to tell the difference between characters when they were unmasked, and that all the female characters in particular were almost identical. I didn’t bring it up in Batman vs. Robin, but that inability to differentiate between characters is becoming an issue over in that ongoing franchise. The big reveal scene of Talon’s identity in that movie (and that he was sleeping with Bruce’s love interest) was completely undercut by the fact that, with the shadowing choices used in the scene to evoke the light of a city skyline at night meant that I initially thought we were finding out that Talon was Nightwing, since they had the exact same jawline, cheekbones, and haircut. Later scenes in normal lighting reveal that he’s a brunet, which helps us tell them apart from that point on in the film when they are out of costume, but that’s not the kind of character modeling you want in an animated film. Here, even though they have the same hair color and are in a lot of scenes together during their college flashbacks, even in the relatively simplified Bruce Timm style, Magnus and Langstrom have sufficiently different features that it’s never an issue, and that’s worth praising here. It’s a small thing, but it’s important. 

I enjoyed this one as a nice, refreshing break, and as an interesting spin on the whole “through a lens, darkly” thing that shows us our characters in a different context. The animation style feels like coming home after a long time away, and the plot zips along at a great pace between legitimately interesting backstory reveals. This one gets an unequivocal recommendation.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman vs. Robin (2015)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

In this follow-up to Son of Batman, the titular Batman and son butt heads over (sigh) the use of deadly force. It’s more complicated than that this time around, luckily, but that’s once again the dead horse we’re beating, still. It was hard to get my enthusiasm up for this one, since it not only features Damian, whom I’m mostly apathetic about, but also introduces the Court of Owls, a Gotham secret society introduced shortly after I stopped reading comics and which I don’t find particularly interesting. This ended up being a bit more interesting than expected, though, and helped me push through. 

The film opens with Batman (Jason O’Mara) following Robin/Damian (Stuart Allen) to the hideout of the evil Dollmaker (Weird Al(!)), where the latter has traced a series of kidnappings. The ten-year-old Boy Wonder has impulsively gone ahead and forced Batman to follow him instead of going together. By the time he catches up, he starts freeing the children while his son and sidekick pursues Dollmaker, leaving an opportunity for the mysterious Talon (Jeremy Sisto) to introduce himself (mysteriously, of course), give Damian a little speech about how murder is sometimes necessary, and then kill Dollmaker, leaving the scene so that it appears Damian did it. Bruce is quick to believe that this is the case, even if Alfred (David McCallum) and Dick/Nightwing (Sean Maher) are more willing to believe the boy. Alfred, rather irresponsibly, fiddles with the home security system to allow Robin the chance to go roaming about the city at night—remember, trained assassin or not, he is ten—which allows Talon to continue to try and lure the kid to the dark side. For his part, Bruce isn’t doing such a hot job at being a father, given that he hasn’t even mentioned Damian to the woman that he’s currently dating, Samantha (Grey DeLisle), let alone introduced them, and he’s having a hard time adjusting to suddenly being a father. Luckily, this leads easily into flashbacks to his own childhood, including his hearing about a secret society known as “the Court of Owls” that rule Gotham from the shadows, and his father’s gentle bedtime promises that there was no such thing. In the present, it’s clear that they do, and that they’re pulling some strings; in fact, their Grandmaster is unwittingly working away at him from two angles, as the Court is attempting to flush out Batman before he can end their criminal activities and court (no pun intended) Bruce Wayne into joining their ranks after his father had rejected them decades before. Talon is their enforcer, and his loyalty is based upon their promise to make him into one of their immortal soldiers (with the caveat that they haven’t really perfected the process, and it seems to always be a little bit of a failure). 

The fight scenes in this one are pretty good, which is always true, but there’s a little more variety in this outing. There’s sparring earlier on between Damian and other characters, and it’s fine and all, but there’s a clear difference in the body language of the characters later in the film when Damian has gone rogue. In his first fight with Batman, it’s clear that Bruce is just trying to let his son tire himself out with his spin kicks and acrobatics so that he doesn’t actually have to punch his child in the face, but eventually realizes he’s going to have to, and that was sufficiently dynamic visually that it’s worth noting upon. The big invasion of Wayne Manor by the Court’s “Owls” made for a satisfactory climactic set piece, albeit I’m very bored with Batmechs, I can tell you that much. What really makes this one stand out is Bruce getting dosed with hallucinogenic gas; he basically has a bad acid trip in which he foresees Damian becoming a killer, wearing the cape and cowl, and that makes him want to be a better father. In his hallucination, the child version of himself/Damian (their similarity to one another having previously been underscored by using the same character model with different eye colors in the earlier film is carried over into this one) tells him that, in his grief, he had allowed himself to become little better than the “dark forces” that killed his parents, and that his unwillingness to listen to his son would cause Damian to become something even worse. 

These movies are rarely this psychologically mature or complex, so I like that what drives the emotional story for the two main adult characters here, Talon and Bruce, is what each of them is projecting about themselves onto Damian. You know Batman’s backstory, and Talon’s is a kind of dark mirror of both Bruce’s and Damian’s. An orphan like Bruce, Talon was taken in by a thief who taught him how the finer points of burglary in a kind of criminal reflection of Bruce’s mentorship of Dick and Damian, but Talon was mercilessly beaten for his failures. This led to him becoming a vigilante as an adult as well, but under the guidance of the Court of Owls, his activity always has the flavor of violent vengeance, while Bruce (ostensibly) values justice over revenge. Bruce hallucinates Damian as a mass-murderer on an unimaginable scale because he fears this darkness in himself. Talon, for his part, sees a great deal of himself in Damian, and perhaps also sees the possibility of making up for what was done to him, turning the boy into a killer like himself but also making sure that the generational abusive trauma stops with him, as twisted as that might be. When it becomes the best option for the Court’s end goals to kill Damian, Talon ultimately refuses, looking into the boy’s face and seeing his own, just as Bruce had, and being unwilling to continue the cycle of violence, revolting against the Court instead. The ultimate conflict comes down to two different men projecting their traumas onto a little boy, and what they do when that trigger is brushed. It’s thoughtful, and elevates this one a little bit over some others in this franchise. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Assault on Arkham (2014)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

For the first time since Superman: Unbound, we’ve got one of these movies that’s not part of the “DCAMU.” It’s not untethered from a pre-existing continuity altogether, however, as this one is, for all intents and purposes, deliberately invoked synergy between the animated direct-to-video films and the Batman: Arkham video game franchise. I’m not really familiar with those; I played through about 20% of the first game, decided it wasn’t really the kind of gameplay that I’m into, and never really returned to it. They’re popular games, critically and commercially, but I’m just not that into that much sneaking and stealthing. With that admission, I have no idea how this movie is supposed to fit into that continuity (Wikipedia has that covered for you, if you’re interested), and if there’s something I’m supposed to be annoyed about here because it contradicts this or that here and there, you’ve come to the wrong place for that bit of criticism. But as you can already tell from the star rating above, this one turned out a lot better than the last couple of times the studio plopped out a cross-promotional tie-in. 

The Riddler (Matthew Gray Gubler) is up to shenanigans, and Amanda Waller (CCH Pounder) has one of her black ops teams on murder duty, but Batman (Kevin Conroy) takes care of the situation and remands Riddler back to Arkham Asylum. This prompts Waller to put together—you guessed it—a Suicide Squad, to infiltrate the facility and reclaim a thumb drive in Riddler’s cane. Her recruits are Deadshot (Neal McDonough), Captain Boomerang (Greg Ellis), Black Spider (Giancarlo Esposito), King Shark (John DiMaggio), and Killer Frost (Jennifer Hale). Oh, and Harley Quinn (Hynden Walch), of course, and our sacrificial goon who gets his head blown off to prove Waller’s sincerity to the others is KGBeast, if you’re playing bingo at home. Harley lets herself get caught and taken to Arkham as part of the infiltration plan, but things are complicated by the fact that she and a thoroughly locked-down Joker end up interacting. This triggers her rage and ends up with her attempting to shoot him through the holes in his Hannibal Lecter-esque cell, which is only effective insofar as creating a tear on the inside of his cell that will allow him to escape later. There are plans within plans, of course, as one or more of the draftees may be there to “take care” of Riddler, and their competing agendas mean that there are going to be some changing loyalties throughout. 

This isn’t a Batman movie – not really. I’m not all that shocked that this falls under the “Batman” label, however, and not just because it’s extended universe (sigh) stuff for the Arkham games. There are (roughly) 52 of these, as noted in the introduction, and within those titles, “Wonder Woman” appears all of twice (3.8%), “Superman” ten times (19.2%), and “Justice League” thirteen times (25%). “Batman” appears in twenty titles (38.5%), and that’s all down to the fact that WB marketing knows what side of the batbread is batbuttered. Batman is around but this isn’t about him. This is a Suicide Squad movie, through and through, with a plot that, in some ways, both presages the much-maligned 2016 feature and pre-emptively improves upon it. There’s bound to be character overlap, of course, but the premise of this one is a lot more sensible; instead of sending a crew of mostly-mortal criminals who happen to have good aim to try and stop a magical apocalypse, here we’ve got a few different skill sets that are tasked to work together to pull off a heist, and some of them also have “assassination” in their specific dossier. When he does appear, Batman is working his own parallel investigation that periodically overlaps or interacts with the Squad pulling an Ocean’s to get into a vault. 

As when she voiced the character before in Public Enemies, Pounder once again proves that she was born to play Waller, although the character is reduced to being a bit more one-note and villainous than more nuanced portrayals since, in case you forgot, this is a video game tie-in. Walch is fun as Harley Quinn, who’s played comedically in this deadly serious world, which makes for a nice touch. Other characters get in on it, too, with the odd romance that grows between Killer Frost and King Shark drawing a few chuckles. Shark himself looks a lot like Venture Bros. character Baron Underbheit, which adds to the comedy, and when his head explodes, it seems that direct visual inspiration is taken from the goombas in the Super Mario Bros. movie. It’s a tad obvious from the outset that Joker will escape from his cell and complicate the plan, but there’s a lot of real tension in the helicopter escape scene. All of the fight scenes are decent, and the animation is nice and fluid. 

There should be no mistaking; this is a product first and a creative endeavor last, but it’s a product of good quality that ticks off all the right boxes. Conroy is Batman, forever (no pun intended) and always. If you’re looking for a fun little Suicide Squad story, this is well above the median. And the breakout scene where all of the villains get to show off a little is fun. There are worse Suicide Squads out there, even if this one only exists to milk a few extra dollars out of fans of the game series. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Son of Batman (2014)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

Canon is a funny thing. I think that for a lot of people and within a lot of media, what’s “real” in any long-running piece of fiction is whatever was the normal state of affairs when you entered the fandom. Whatever happens moving forward from there is just new stuff to enjoy or not. When something is added retroactively (usually referred to as “retcon,” as in “retroactive continuity”), it can be something really fun and new and interesting, or it might end up being a big pile of steaming garbage. For the former, my favorite comic book character of all time, Jessica Jones, was completely retconned out of nothing for the series Alias (no relation) because Brian Michael Bendis wasn’t allowed to use Jessica “Spider-Woman” Drew for his noir detective series, so he had to make someone up. For the latter, my go-to example is the 2003 retcon that Chuck Austen introduced in an X-Men storyline entitled “The Draco.” This arc “revealed” that beloved character Nightcrawler was actually half-demon and his entire years-long arc of coming to terms with his faith and becoming a member of the clergy was actually a manipulation on the part of a group that sought to “unveil” his “demonic” form in concurrence with a technologically-induced rapture once they were able to elevate him to pope. Everybody hated it, no one accepts it as canon, and we’ve probably had two or three more retcons since then. As an example of changes that have gone back and forth for better and for worse, there are the characters of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, who were initially introduced merely as members of Magento’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants before being revealed to be his children (good), before they were again retconned to not only not be his children, but to also not be mutants at all. Why? Because the characters had been members of the Avengers at one point, and thus were shared between Disney’s ownership of MCU-related film rights and Fox’s then-independent ownership of X-Men-related film rights, and Disney, like a toxic parent in a shared custody situation, flexed their muscles to get the source material to change. 

I have to admit that I struggle with this myself, with the particular way that my brain functions meaning that I’m in conflict between being (a) resistant to big changes, (b) appreciative of new angles that make for a more interesting story even if it’s not in alignment with what I’ve believed before, and (c) annoyed by changes that conflicts with what we already knew. Where I was worst about this (and where I’ve been forced to grow the most in how I approach the material) is in the Star Trek franchise. My weird little prepubescent brain accepted the aesthetic differences between my contemporary present and the original series without question, but by the time Enterprise rolled around, I was of just the right age to take offense at and get too caught up in complaining about its “too modern” look for a prequel series. It’s been over two decades since, and the large and amorphous continuity of Star Trek has just gotten bigger and more difficult to contain in the intervening years, and at this point, I don’t care how neurodivergent you (and by “you” I mean “we”) are, sometimes you just have to let go. 

This is all a long-winded introduction to talk about my feelings about the ways that the story of Batman changed over the course of my life. When I was a kid, Batman: The Animated Series was Batman, with the occasional sighting of an episode of the Adam West sixties series when I was at the home of a relative who had cable. All of the things that are “Batman” to me are caught up in that series: the faithful loyalty and acerbic wit of Alfred, the partnership of a Robin, the unresolved romantic/sexual tension with Catwoman, the rivalry with the Joker, the presence of a large, consistent rogues gallery (Mr. Freeze, The Riddler, Penguin, Poison Ivy, Two-Face, and second-stringers like Clayface, Scarecrow, and Mad Hatter), and an eventual Batgirl. But when you’re talking about a story continuity that was already six decades old at that point, all of those elements had to have been introduced as new at some point, and, as it was ongoing, it was never going to remain static and unchanging at that point. In fact, the character of Harley Quinn, who is now one of the most recognizable and well-known DC characters in the mainstream, was created for and introduced within BTAS, and although she’s beloved by now, I’m sure that there were cranky gatekeepers at the time who hated her introduction. New live action films continued to be made, and their effect on the landscape of the comics and their affiliated media would echo across the narrative topography, and those reverberations would then end up in the new adaptations, symbiotically. It’s impossible to know which ones are going to be a flash in the pan before being rejected and never referenced again (see above re: demon Nightcrawler) and which ones will “take” and stick around. When the whole “Court of Owls” thing (a secret society of rich Gothamites going back generations who influenced the city) was introduced in 2012, I didn’t think it would stick around, but given that it’s now associated with Bat-lore in the public consciousness because of Fox’s Gotham, it’s probably here to stay. Even before that when Damian Wayne, Batman’s son via Talia al Ghul, was first introduced in comics in 2006, the obvious expectation was that he would prove so unpopular that he would be written out as a character and written off as a failed ploy, but here we are, nearly twenty years later, and it looks like he’s here to stay, too. 

Son of Batman opens on the island fortress headquarters of the League of Assassins, headed by Ra’s al Ghul (Giancarlo Esposito). Under his grandfather’s tutelage, young Damian (Stuart Allan) is being trained to one day replace Ra’s, all under the watchful eye of his mother, Talia (Morena Baccarin). Under the cover of night, spurned pupil Deathstroke (Thomas Gibson), who was previously being groomed to become the new leader of the League before Damian’s birth, has returned for revenge. Ra’s is critically injured and, unable to make it to the Lazarus Pit that has so prolonged his life, dies. In order to seek out her father’s killer and find her revenge, Talia leaves her son with his father, whom she knows is both Bruce Wayne and Batman (Jason O’Mara), under the care of the hero and his butler, Alfred (David McCallum). Gotham is less of a safe haven than expected, however, as this is also the home of Dr. Kirk Langstrom (Xander Berkeley), a scientist who has been working on a serum that will turn League assassins into bat hybrid creatures known as “Manbats.” When Langstrom and Talia are both captured by Deathstroke, it’s up to Batman and former protege turned independent hero Dick “Nightwing” Grayson (Sean Maher) to find them and stop Deathstroke, with young Damian as the newer, less morally clear Robin.

This is a good one. The animation is crisp, the designs are clean, the contrast is extremely well done. Scenes in the day are suffused with light, and the more frequent night scenes have a slight moonlight glow to them. It’s carried over from Justice League: War, of course, but it’s nice that it’s consistent here, and this slots into the same art style as that film without looking identical to it, which is a nicer touch than I was expecting from this ongoing series. The fact that this is supposed to be a new timeline that’s still in the early days of the emergence of heroes continues to be a bit of sand in the shoe, as the previous film made it seem like Batman had only been on the scene for a couple of years at the most, while this one now establishes that he’s been at this long enough that he’s already had one young sidekick graduate to start his own enterprise. It’s also strange that this series would decide to kill off Ra’s al Ghul so early into this franchise (only the third film now if we count Flashpoint Paradox, and the first to focus on Batman primarily), it seems very sudden and early to get rid of one of the Bat’s most important foes, and means that any attempts to graft other adaptations of stories into this continuity may have to compensate for his absence. 

Still, that’s not this film’s problem. It’s good! Not special, really, but good, definitely above the median of quality in this overall franchise so far. I ended up making yet another long-winded introduction and a comparison to Star Trek (two of my specialties!) all up top because, really, there’s not that much to say. I’ve listed what I didn’t like above, and it’s mostly minor stuff that relates to continuity, and which most people probably wouldn’t care too much about. What there is to like isn’t so groundbreaking that it requires description, either; the fight choreography is very good, and the more ninja-style action is a real standout when most of these fights are all about punching while flying, eye beams, and occasional Amazonian hand-to-hand content. Damian has a lot of potential for his petulance to be extremely annoying, especially when he has a nepo baby’s sense of smug entitlement coupled with no real qualms about committing straight up murder because of how he was raised. Instead, he’s not only tolerable, but occasionally even likable, when he isn’t being a twerp about how effeminate the original Robin costume was. 

I might have been wrong about this new continuity within the larger franchise. I’ve seen a few of the others and although I don’t remember disliking them, I don’t remember them being particularly memorable, either. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The People’s Joker (2024)

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The People’s Joker made me cry. 

A festival darling a couple of years ago, this DIY transfemme autofiction bildungsroman took an usually long time to reach general audiences, seeing as it was stuck in legal limbo for a while. You see, Vera Drew chose to tell the story of her life—from her earliest realizations that her body didn’t match her concept of herself, to her first real romance and how that other person’s journey of self-discovery helped her understand herself even further, into a happy, fantasy future—all through the lens of living in a comic book world. After an opening that parodies the framing device of Joker, we see a flashback to our essentially unnamed protagonist as a child (when her deadname is spoken aloud, by her mother for instance, it’s bleeped, except in one scene later where it’s uncensored to great effect). In this world, the little AMAB’s greatest dream is to one day be a cast member on UCB (that is, the United Clown Bureau, rather than the Upright Citizen’s Brigade) Live, a parody of SNL in which men in the cast are credited individually as Jokers or Jokemen, while all of the women are consigned to being credited en masse as “The Harlequins.” 

Notably, in this imagining, that Bruce Wayne is Batman is a well-known fact, and he all but rules Gotham with an iron glove. His drones scour the streets for crime, all comedy other than that of UCB Live has been outlawed, and there are films about him in-universe, one of which is clearly a take on Batman Forever, with one of the lines spoken by Nicole Kidman cracking our protagonist’s egg. When she asks her mother about it on the car ride home after the movie, and whether one could be born into “the wrong body,” her mother takes her straight to Arkham, where the sinister Dr. Crane prescribes a semi-antidepressant called Smylex, which is taken via inhaler and instantly distorts the patient’s face into a rictus grin. After a troubled childhood in which an eternally offscreen father leaves all child-rearing to his wife, and with whom our protagonist has an understandably strained relationship, our protagonist (now played by Vera Drew as an adult) moves to Gotham and attempts to get involved on UCB Live and is accepted into the incubator program only to discover that it’s a for-profit scam. This does enable our protagonist to meet their new best friend, Oswald Cobblepot, at the UCB center, and the two of them decide to set up their own illegal anti-establishment “anti-comedy” club. A whole rogues gallery becomes the (lampshaded) found family of the protagonist, including Poison Ivy, Catwoman, Bane, and the Riddler (who gets in early as riddles are, in fact, the antithesis of jokes, making him perfect for their anti-comedy). Our protagonist finds that none of their jokes land, until one day, they see a performance by a Joker named Jason Todd, who’s modeled after the Jared Leto “interpretation” of the character, down to the “damaged” tattoo on his forehead. 

The audience notices before our protagonist does that Jason’s open coat reveals his top surgery scars, so it comes as little surprise to us when he comes out as transgender to our protagonist, although it’s a mild shock to them. Our protagonist asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin, and we see Joker and Jason, whom she calls “Mistah J,” play out, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the complexity of relationships with people who are, whether they tell you at the start with a tattoo on their face or not, damaged. People who are toxic can also be the first people to see us for who we really are, and while that doesn’t cover for the ways in which their behavior is harmful, it does add shades of gray to the fact that these are people who may ultimately teach us something about ourselves. This culminates in our protagonist’s decision to proceed with gender affirming care, presented here as her plummet into a vat of estrogen, Harley Quinn style, only for her and Mr. J to come face to face with the Batman, who has his own abusive backstory with Jason. This is all stuff that is better discovered than recapped, so I won’t summarize further, but this sort of gives you the idea of what this narrative is. Kinda. 

What’s really fun here is just how many different ideas and styles are combined. The segments about J-the-H’s childhood are largely live action, sometimes in locations or sets but sometimes backgrounded only by collages or drawings of her hometown of Smallville. The film-within-a-film mentioned above uses action figures and 3D models to bring not-Batman Forever to life, while some sequences are fully comprised of what appears to be hand-drawn animation. One character exists solely as a puppet, while Poison Ivy is a purely a computer model that looks like she was rendered for a Windows 2000 ROM-based semi-animated point-and-clicker, and characters with more immediate impact on the plot appear in whatever the reimagined memory demands. Some of the film is some combination of several of these, and it’s often so poorly composited that it looks like it’s been cobbled together with excerpts from The Amazing Bulk, but that adds charm rather than taking away from it. I should warn that making the film “busy” in this way might not work for everyone; my viewing companion in particular said that the film’s constant jumps between styles did not mesh with his particular strain of ADHD, and this seems to have made the narrative less legible to him than to me. If you’re able to handle pastiche movies like the kinds put out by Everything is Terrible, you’ll be able to follow this. 

There’s a lot of heart here, especially when it’s clear that Vera is speaking through Joker, like when she admits that when she first arrived in the city she would sometimes call suicide hotlines that would automatically connect her to Kansas because of her area code, and she would use that experience to ground herself by asking how the weather was back home, even if that place had never really been “home.” It’s not all positive, however, as we also feel the biting sting of betrayal when Mr. J calls her by her deadname, the only time that it’s said clearly, in an argument; as she recalls, he had never even known her by that name, so it wasn’t an accident or a slip of the tongue but an intentional use to hurt her. It’s visceral and real, which feels like an odd thing to say about a movie that so provocatively calls attention to its artifice. 

One thing that this one has over the film that it’s parodying/satirizing/reimagining is that it’s actually funny. I’ll admit that I didn’t see the entirety of Todd Phillips’s Joker, but I can promise you that I saw enough. It’s not funny. And hey, not every joke in this one lands, but they come so fast and so furiously across a variety of spectrums that there’s going to be something for everyone here, except for the people who refuse to give the film a chance based purely on their ideologies. The anti-comedy stylings of several of the jokers are funny in their anti-humor with no real knowledge of comics, but there are obviously in-jokes and references, like the omnipresence of the TV-topping mind control device that Jim Carrey’s Riddler’s plan in Forever hinged upon and Catwoman’s complaint that Frank Miller always writes her as a sex worker (not that sex work is bad, she clarifies, but because it’s sexist of him to think that women can’t just be burglars). Most of these are funny even without the context, and some of the jokes that landed most with my theater crowd were oblique jokes about pop culture in general; the biggest laugh of the night came when the yet-unhatched Joker asks to be introduced on stage as Joker the Harlequin for the first time and their Penguiny friend commenting on their femme attire and pointing out that drag, like comedy, had been outlawed, but only because of the fallout from the explosion at RuPaul’s fracking ranch. 

This is an unusual experience of a film, and I expect that whatever impact it might have been able to have on larger culture has been largely blunted by Warner Bros’ intensive scrutiny and attempts to prevent its release with (unsustainable) claims that it falls outside of fair use, and the overall silence about it (so far at least) from the dipshit side of the cultural divide means that it may not get the popularity bump that everything the right wing pundits complain about does, for better and for worse. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I got something that was unique in its presentation but universal in its examination of the way that (sigh) sometimes, it’s society that’s sick, or it’s our parents who make us sick by their reaction to curiosity and parts of the human experience that are repressed due to societal pressures. It’s an Adult Swim fever dream, and, in its final moments and with its final line, it brought tears to my eyes. You know if this is for you, and if it is, seek it out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: The Dark Knight Returns (2012, 2013)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

In this very special double-sized issue of The Not-So-New 52, we will be covering not one but two films (after a fashion). Even though it’s Marvel that’s better known for their double-sized special editions, I won’t let the fact that Warner Premiere released their adaptation of Frank Miller’s seminal 1986 work The Dark Knight Returns in two separate parts keep me from reviewing them together. Combined, they make up a run time of just about two-and-a-half hours, which is the length of a real movie and is shorter than any live action Batman movie has been since 2005, so let’s get to it.

The Dark Knight Returns is probably one of the best known stories in the Batman canon, right? It, alongside Watchmen, basically shattered the paradigm of comic books as a medium in the late 1980s, ushering in (for better and for worse) a whole new era of comics, one designed with a more mature reader in mind. For some, this meant more adult storytelling; for others, this meant more grounded, realistic stories; for still others, this meant more tits, guns, and swearing, none of which are bad things in their own right, but which were not used creatively. The comic version of Returns can be considered a bit of an original sin with regards to creating expectations of maturity in the medium that instead ushered in an era characterized by a lack of subtlety, artistically meritless storytelling, and so, so, so many pockets—more than anyone could ever want or need. But Returns can’t be blamed for that, since other than a few poorly aged elements (as in Year One, Frank Miller’s depiction of Selena is once again as a sex worker, although she’s graduated to madame in her old age), there’s nothing that stands out. It was groundbreaking in its time and for good reason. Even reading it today, it’s hard not to be impressed with the unconventional use of the medium, from the way that political talking heads are presented in little boxes that capture the not-quite-square edges of a cathode ray tube TV, the way that simultaneous action is depicted not from simple panel-to-panel cutaways but in the way that a splash page might be boxed in by a series of smaller squares and errant dialogue boxes. Its place in the canon is well-deserved, and while I understand the critical backlash when it’s viewed through the lens of its (il)legacy, I see this for the landmark that it is. 

This is the story of an aged Bruce Wayne, forced out of retirement just as Jim Gordon is forced into it, back on the prowl after watching his city fall into disrepair and dystopia under the Reagan administration (an element that the film keeps intact, making a product of its time into a period piece). As more innocent civilians fall victim to the ever-expanding gang calling themselves The Mutants, Bruce once again dons the cowl in order to fight the rising tide of crime in Gotham. Along the way, he finds himself aided by Carrie Kelly, a teenage tomboy who christens herself the new Robin and refuses to be left out of things. Unfortunately, although the wounds of the past may scar and heal, they can also run deep. The supposedly reformed Harvey Dent, now having undergone extensive reconstruction of the side of his face that scarred him and made him Two-Face, is unable to avoid the temptations of recidivism and his own alter ego, while the Joker, catatonic (and thus harmless) for decades, awakens out of his waking sleep as soon as his nemesis returns to public attention. 

This ends Part 1 of the films, while Part 2 spends some time with the long-delayed final dance between Batman and Joker, which ends in a way that brings down the wrath of Gotham’s new commissioner, Ellen Yindel, who wants Batman brought down, dead or alive. Outside of the context of all of this, there’s Cold War shenanigans afoot, which finally intersects with our main story when the Gipper starts a nuclear war with the USSR via conflict with the fictional nation of Corto Maltese. Superman, reduced to little more than an errand boy for the White House, manages to divert the missiles that are bound for the US, but only just, and the resultant EMP blast causes chaos in Gotham. Through the respect that he commands from the Mutants gang—some of whom have already rechristened themselves “Sons of Batman” following his hard-won defeat of the Mutant leader—he conscripts them to help get people out of harm’s way in the forms of various fires and other disasters. In one memorable image, the shadow of an airplane that is falling out of the sky grows larger as people scream in terror below. And in the midst of all of this, Reagan sends Superman in to “handle” his old friend.

Frank Miller, who wrote both Year One and The Dark Knight Rises in a short period of time in the back half of the 1980s, is a polarizing figure, and there are elements of his political … “eccentricities” all over the original work and, as a result of being a pretty faithful adaptation, this film. Don’t be confused by the fact that Reagan is presented as a bumbling fool playing dice with the so-called free world in the name of his ego and the corporations that own him; this is a story that deeply reflects the right-wing views of its creator. It’s tricky, because Miller’s oeuvre often reflects a staunch anti-authoritarian bent, insofar as he depicts all politicians as either puppets or puppeteers, all police (other than Jim Gordon) as rotten and violent, and all authority as inherently corrupt. On the other hand, his heroes are usually somewhere on a narrow spectrum between the Randian hero (individualistic, suited to his life through intelligence and aptitude, characterized by moral fortitude — at least in the eyes of the author) and the Great Man Theory (that great leaders, like Batman and Jim Gordon, are born with the instinct to lead when the need for them to emerge is greatest, and that history is founded upon the acts of such men); the latter of these two is a pillar of fascism, and the former could charitably be called fascism-curious. Miller’s Batman is the libertarian Batman, for better or for worse, but in a way that feels so quaint that it’s almost comforting in its simplicity in comparison to whatever the fuck is happening today. 

So, yeah, Reagan is the overarching villain of this piece, but not because of any of the reasons that he was in real life (scratch just about any social problem in our country and Reagan bleeds), but because his cowboy aw-shucks approach to international conflict wrote a check that his ass couldn’t cash. All the other targets of ridicule are strawman sock puppets through whom Miller can verbalize a reductive caricature of bleeding hearts who get their comeuppance, always painfully and frequently fatally; they espouse the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to getting gassed to death. Carrie Kelley’s parents are burnouts too stoned to notice that their teenage daughter isn’t in her room at night, let alone that she’s become the protege of the local vigilante that they consider a fascist (a bit of pre-emptive mocking of any reader who might have the same criticism). All mainstream media TV anchors (other than Lana Lang) are empty-headed, spineless gigglepusses spouting glib puns while delivering devastating, life-changing news. A man-on-the-street interview features one man praising Batman’s defeat of the Mutant leader and expressing that he hopes the Dark Knight takes out the landlords next, and we’re supposed to disagree with him. The (then) newer, gentler approach to psychiatric treatment is painted as an elaborate pantomime of rendering individual responsibility irrelevant through the construction of a narrative of victimhood, which is a reactionary position to a reductive view of some mental health. 

The last of these is personified in Dr. Bartholomew Wolper, a fame-seeking psychiatrist who also identifies Batman as a “fascist vigilante,” and who first gains attention in the narrative as the doctor treating Harvey Dent. Wolper’s argument is that all of the rogues gallery of Gotham are all victims of Batman, you see, acting out horrific crimes because the Batman is so menacing that he creates his own villains. After three years of rehabilitation and extensive reconstructive surgery that restores him to his pre-Two-Face face, Wolper is successful in getting Dent paroled, only for Dent to disappear within hours and return to his old habits immediately, with his mantra of “both sides match” given a darker meaning as we see that he hallucinates himself as fully scarred now. Despite this clear error in judgment, when Joker is inspired out of his withdrawal from the world, Wolper is given the opportunity to treat him as well, and once again advocates for the release of a dangerous murderer. The irony, of course, is that Wolper is actually right this time, as the narrative makes it clear that Joker truly had no will to live without a
Batman to face, and he probably would have remained in his catatonia until he died of old age if Bruce hadn’t been forced to take up the cowl again and wake him up out of his stupor. Any kudos we could give Wolper for his insight here is immediately irrelevant, as he is the Joker’s first victim almost immediately, getting his throat slit live on television while on a thinly veiled late night show (in the original comic, the host is “Dave Endocrine” and clearly modeled on Letterman, while in the film he’s just a generic brunet voiced by the actual Conan O’Brien). 

This is a fundamentally conservative work in many ways, but more than that, it’s reactionary. The media, the peace movement, psychiatry as whole: it’s all quackery in Miller’s eyes and is therefore the same under his pen. In this most recent viewing, my second, I was struck by some of the similarities to a semi-contemporary work that we had recently discussed on the podcast, Tightrope, which was also right-of-center in its relationship with 80s urban crime. Even if you’ve never really identified it as such, you know the kind of thing that I’m talking about when you see it. Everything’s always grimy, the city is a place where it’s not safe to go out at night or in the day, as upstanding citizens are in constant mortal danger at the hands of violent addicts and remorseless sociopaths, and the only thing standing between life and death for the next victim is a morally gray cop who’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. It bears a lot in common with Returns, down to the Reagan cameo (in Tightrope, this is in the form of a papier-mâché head of the Gipp in a parade float storage facility). Returns takes place in a similarly dangerous locale, but with a societal order whose edges are more frayed and a greater sense of hopelessness, but it’s impossible to separate it from its regressive elements; that man on the street who wanted Batman to take care of landlords that I mentioned a few paragraphs back? In Miller’s original text, it’s homosexuals that he hopes Batman eradicates with violence. Even when the words are changed, that spirit of bone-deep right-wing meanness permeates everything. 

But the fact of the matter is this: The Dark Knight Returns is a great narrative. Truly one of the best. All through the first half of the story, I kept thinking about how it’s impossible to really translate the way that the comic used its form as part of its storytelling device into a feature for the screen, and grousing about the things that I didn’t like about it. Some of the 80s slang that the Mutants and Carrie use is like, totally radical, so razor, utterly fetch, but sounds artificial when actually spoken aloud instead of read on the page, and the casting of Ariel Winter (of Modern Family fame) as Carrie was also dissonant to me in a way that was distracting. But once the meat of the story gets going, it takes off and doesn’t stop, and I was won over by it. Peter Weller endows the aged Wayne with so much pathos that it’s impossible not to be moved by it, which feels silly to say about one of these little direct to video products, but there’s a great attention to detail here that’s worth the time, even if it’s twice what’s normal for one of these. It’s not perfect, but it’s so damn good that you forgive it for its shortcomings. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — Doom (2012)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

A direct sequel to Crisis on Two Earths, Justice League: Doom does not follow up on the apparent membership drive that ended the previous film. It seems that only one new recruit has joined the team since that movie’s finale, but it’s still a continuation, if one knows that this is the case and what to look for. This was another one that I had seen a few times even before beginning this project, not so much out of any particular fondness for it, but because it was the last one that was released before I finished grad school and moved back to Baton Rouge, so it was an easy one to put on in the background and do some unpacking or chores. It’s not as strong a film as Crisis was, but it still has some of the same magic, and it’s pretty good, even if it’s a little thinner than its predecessor. 

The Royal Flush gang, a villainous group that is characterized by their costumes taking inspiration from the highest point cards for the suit of spades, has been engaging in a series of break-ins, and Batman is on the case. He discovers that they have been using a piece of technology that allows them to pass through walls in order to complete their crimes, and when he engages them, the rest of the Justice League gets involved. During this distraction, Flash villain Mirror Master is able to use his ability to hide in reflections to surreptitiously enter the Batcave via the Batmobile’s rear view mirror, where he downloads files from the main computer. Some time later, each member of the League is attacked while they are alone. The man behind the attacks is Vandal Savage, an immortal who has been alive since the dawn of mankind, and he offers each of the League’s individual nemeses the opportunity to finish off their archenemy once and for all. While in his civilian guise, Martian Manhunter is given a drink by an attractive woman who turns out to be his enemy Ma’alefa’ak (another shapeshifting Martian and, depending on the continuity, J’onn’s brother), and the drink turns out to contain a compound that will result in the Manhunter sweating out highly flammable magnesium. Wonder Woman faces off against Cheetah, who manages to land a cut on the Amazon, resulting in an infection that causes her to see everyone around her as Cheetah, so that she will fight until her heart gives out. Superman is lured to the top of the Daily Planet building because a downsized reporter is planning to jump off of the roof, but is in fact a disguised Metallo, who is armed with a gun with a kryptonite bullet. Flash ends up with a bomb drilled into his wrist which will explode if he goes under a certain speed, Green Lantern is lured to an apparent hostage situation that goes south in a way that leaves him feeling unworthy of his powers, and Batman is tricked out of his home by the apparent disterment of his parents’ graves, only to find himself taken off guard by Bane, who knocks him out and stuffs him in his father’s casket (with the late Thomas Wayne’s skeletal remains) and reburies them in Thomas’s grave. 

It’s the darkest hour for the Justice League, but Batman breaks free first by digging himself out of his father’s grave and then finding Green Lantern and showing him that the people who were presumably killed by his failure were animatronics designed to shake his confidence, and along with newest ally Cyborg, they are able to rescue the others from their various traps. Batman reveals that all of these plans were actually his, that they were his failsafes should any of the other members of the League go rogue (or fall under brainwashing or magic compulsion, or any other manner of things that can and do happen in these four color fantasies). The others are not pleased with this revelation, but they still have to work together to face off against Vandal Savage, whose current plan is nothing short of genocidal: induce a solar flare that will ravage half of the planet’s surface and rewind the clock on mankind’s technological level to that of the Industrial Revolution. 

As a movie, this one doesn’t really feel like a sequel to the film that preceded it. While that one began life as a part of the Justice animated series, it had an entirely new voice cast that relied on some of the stunt casting that this series was known for, while this one mostly brings back the voice cast of that show. Kevin Conroy is back as Batman (as it should ever be), Tim Daly returns to voice Superman, Susan Eisenberg again voices Wonder Woman, Carl Lumbly is once again Martian Manhunter, and Michael Rosenbaum also returns to play Flash (albeit a different Flash). The only major casting change is that this film has Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern, as it features the Hal Jordan version of the character rather than the John Stewart version (voiced by Phil LaMarr). This is Fillion’s second time playing the character following his appearance in Emerald Knights. The character designs are a little different, too, and I watched this one several times without ever realizing it was supposed to be connected to Crisis, despite that one being one of my favorites. This time around, the connections were a little more apparent, especially in the musical choices; the opening title theme for this one very clearly incorporates the distinctive notation from the first. You can hear the exact same motif when the title appears here in Crisis and here, but I don’t think I’ve ever watched them close enough together to notice that before. There’s also fun new voice talent in this one, and it falls to me as one of the carriers of the Farscape fandom flame to call special attention to Claudia Black’s performance as Cheetah, which is absolutely delightful. The scene where Wonder Woman sees everyone as Cheetah gives Black the chance to do some neat little work as different variations on the same voice, which I liked a lot. 

Speaking of villains, however, this one falls a little flat in that department. Whereas Crisis had two interesting villains in the form of the nihilistic Owlman and the unhinged Superwoman, this is one of the thinner portrayals of Vandal Savage. Phil Morris’s voice acting is strong, but the characterization is a bit light, especially when you compare him here to his presence as the overall big bad of Young Justice, which admittedly had a lot more time to flesh him out. While both Owlman’s plan to destroy all universes and Vandal’s here to rule by reducing the population to a manageable half are very much schlocky comic book evil plans, the former had a sense of reality to it based on character motivation, while the latter feels broad and out of proportion for the motivation, like taking a bulldozer to a hangnail. Doom hinges on two major axes: the emotional core of the League’s feelings of betrayal due to Batman’s distrust, and the narrative plot point of the doomsday plan. The climax of the first is much more interesting and comes fairly early on, while the evil plot itself—despite being smaller in scale than in the preceding film—feels very cackly, Saturday morning cartoony. 

It’s unfortunate that this one is a bit of a dull note to end our time with Lauren Montgomery, who directed this film and several previous, starting with Superman Doomsday, when she was only twenty-seven years old(!). She was also a storyboard artist for that one, before she directed Wonder Woman, First Flight, Crisis on Two Earths, Apocalypse, and Year One. She was a storyboard artist on virtually all of the others, and she would continue to do this up through Batman: Bad Blood, at which point she became very heavily involved with a series called Voltron: Legendary Defender. These days, it looks like she’s gearing up to direct an as-yet-untitled animated film that is being released by Avatar Studios (she had previously been a storyboard artist on eight episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender and was a supervising producer on The Legend of Korra in addition to doing some storyboard work for that program), so she’s still working, but this will be her last feature for this franchise. I wish her well! If they ever do another follow-up in this sub-series, I would love to see her return. For now, though, we say goodbye, and choose to remember her work at its best.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman — Year One (2011)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

Right here on the cusp of the twelfth film of this project, I hit the first snag; Batman: Year One is not available on HBO Max, or whatever it’s called these days. Heretofore, every single one of these movies was on the service, and from what I can tell, all of the remaining ones are as well. With the high number of premium subscription service material that has started to migrate over to free services (Lovecraft Country is on Tubi, the people’s streaming service) or more widely accessed ones (Six Feet Under is on Netflix) while David Zaslav plunders and pillages HBO and Warner Brothers, I checked to see if it was on one of those, and it was not. In fact, it’s only available as a rental. So, while I wait to acquire it through the library, I figured I’d talk a little bit about the recent history of these movies as they relate to streaming and the Warner Bros. conglomeration. It hasn’t come up here before, but Warner got into it pretty heavy with Netflix some years back, and it was because of these movies. 

Well, it was technically mostly because of Warner Premiere, but considering that Warner Premiere consisted almost entirely of these films, cheapy cash-ins on legacy animated properties (Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown; Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes; A Miser Brothers’ Christmas), even cheaper long-distant sequels to Warner properties (Return to House on Haunted Hill, The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning, The Lost Boys: The Tribe), eleven separate Scooby-Doo movies, and—inexplicably—Trick ‘r Treat, let’s be honest, these DC flicks were the real reason this happened. In 2010, Netflix and Warner agreed that the former, which was still largely a DVD-by-mail service and had not pivoted to streaming as their primary market, would allow for a 28-day gap between the retail release of a DVD and the date that it would be allowed to be sent out to subscribers. This was under pressure from Warner, who cited at the time that they make approximately 75% of their retail sales for all physical media within that time frame. By 2012, this window had increased to 56 days; to put that time frame into perspective, the first film to be affected by the 28-day window would have been Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, and the last to be mailed out within the first month would be this film, before the next one (Justice League: Doom) would be delayed to two months. 

All of this is, of course, moot now, as Netflix ended its DVD service as of September of last year. A half decade ago, however, DC had the idea to create their own streaming service. It would not only host every DC-related series and movie ever produced, but it would also provide unfettered access to the company’s digital comic vault that contained every story ever published, and would produce a few original series, notably the previously mentioned Titans, the Doom Patrol adaptation, and (most excitingly for me and the reason that I signed up for it) the third season of the prematurely canceled Young Justice series, which was originally supposed to be a Netflix production. DC Universe, as the service was called, didn’t last long, launching in September of 2018 and being discontinued in less than three years in January of 2021, when its programming was folded into the then-new HBO Max service, which had replaced HBO Go in September of 2020, and even as HBO Max was rebranded Max in May of 2023. This didn’t include everything that DC Universe had hosted (obscure TV series like the 1980s Superboy didn’t migrate over), but it has, to my knowledge, always included these animated movies, and the fact that Batman: Year One seems to be missing is another indicator, perhaps, that the overall quality of the service has declined. 

Batman: Year One is a fairly faithful adaptation of its source material, perhaps the most true-to-the-text one we have seen so far. Said comic is also the oldest one that has been tackled in this franchise as well. The Year One comic was released in 1986, following on the heels of the previously discussed crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths, and was intended to cement what would now be the character’s new origin canon, although the Dark Knight’s was one of the least changed backstories under the new reboot. An adaptation of the comic languished in development for decades. In fact, the legends tell us that it was even considered for adaptation as the third film in the Burton Batman franchise, before the reins were turned over to Joel Schumacher in order to move in a more “kid-friendly” direction and away from the gritty reality of this narrative. Years later, when Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was first announced, I seem to remember early trade publications citing that it would be a direct adaptation of Year One, but I don’t feel like fighting with the pathetic shell of a useful search engine that Google has become in order to confirm that one way or another. Even without that confirmation, the 2005 film does bear many similarities to the comic, with two major direct lifts from it; the first is the scene in which Batman summons a huge flock of bats that darken the sky using a supersonic device, and the second a sequence in which Jim Gordon tells Batman, his new ally, about the impending appearance of a clown-like villain who calls himself “Joker,” which is the final scene in both movies. 

This is a short one, but it’s got meat on its bones. On the same January day, Gotham City’s “prodigal son” Bruce Wayne (The OC’s Benjamin McKenzie) returns home, musing from his high vantage point as he flies into the city that it almost looks calm from the air, despite being a seedy place of misery at ground level, while Internal Affairs Lieutenant James Gordon (Bryan Cranston) arrives in the city by train, fretting about the place’s high crime rates and his concerns about bringing his pregnant wife to such a place. Bruce plans to rid Gotham of crime from the ground up, demonstrating that he has spent his eight year absence training physically to do so. Elsewhere, Gordon is “welcomed” to the GCPD by corrupt Commissioner Loeb (frequent Cohen Brothers collaborator Jon Polito), reckless and bloodthirsty SWAT lieutenant Brendon (Stephen Root), and Gordon’s new partner, the violent and hair-triggered Flass (Fred Tatasciore). Loeb hints at some dark part of Gordon’s past that makes him think that he’ll be easy to extort, but Gordon’s plan is the same as Bruce’s: making Gotham a place worth living in. Bruce’s first night out as an attempted crime fighter goes very poorly, as he attempts to rescue an underage sex worker from her pimp, only to be stabbed by the girl herself and being severely beaten by the crowd that gathers. The person who deals him the most damage is a prostitute named Selena Kyle (Eliza Dushku, in a pretty thankless role overall considering what she’s capable of). Although he manages to evade police and drag his way into his home, Bruce sits facing a bust of his father and planning to let himself bleed out if he doesn’t receive a sign that he should go on, which arrives in the form of a bat that crashes through the window. We don’t get to hear the line about “criminals [being] a cowardly and superstitious lot” in his internal monologue, but this is a very straightforward reenactment of the same scene in the comics, which emulates the first appearance of the character all the way back in 1939. 

Inspired, Bruce takes on the costumed alter ego of “Batman,” and although he starts out hassling a trio of teenagers boosting a television set, he eventually works his way up to threatening Loeb and his associate, the mobster Carmine Falcone (Alex Rocco), during a dinner at one of their homes. Gordon is the mythological one good apple in the GCPD, but Loeb’s fury about Batman’s threats leads him to assign Gordon to finding the Batman, all while Jim faces off against his own department — up to and including his fellow detectives beating him with a baseball bat in a parking garage while wearing masks because he refuses to get dirty and join the grift like they did. Inspired by the Bat, Selena Kyle decides to become a masked denizen of the night herself, but in pursuit of theft instead of justice, and models her costume on a cat motif. 

At barely more than an hour, this one just barely qualifies as a feature, but it’s a pretty good one. It’s economically paced, even if the parts with Selena feel like dead weight. In contrast, the original comic had a bit more plot having to do with Harvey Dent (the future Two-Face) as the third face of the fight for justice in Gotham, from within the DA’s office, with the added wrinkle that his overt derring-do made him one of Gordon’s suspects for the true identity of Batman. The Selena stuff is also everything that has aged most poorly about the source material, as it was one of those things where Frank Miller just couldn’t help himself but make Catwoman a sex worker (this was retconned almost immediately and is, for all intents and purposes, the only thing considered non-canonical in the comic to this day). The film’s biggest weakness, however, is that everything great about it has already been adapted in some form. Batman: The Animated Series depicted the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne almost exactly as it was retold in Year One, down to angle and perspectives from the comic. An uninformed viewer would likely see this one and think that it was ripping off Batman Begins by centering the narrative around the antics of Carmine Falcone or having Batman be saved by the appearance of hundreds of bats, but both that character and that sequence originated in this film’s source material. As a whole, I can’t see it having much reason to exist other than for its own sake and for the interest of people who are already familiar with and fans of the comic, which doesn’t seem to add up to much. Cranston is great as Gordon, and it’s great that what feels like the entire second half of the film is just Batman vs. cops, but I’m not sure it’s enough, especially given the number of hoops you have to jump through to find this one. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it does feel … vestigial.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond